Tag: named

  • Danielle Gonzales named to NAEP board

    Danielle Gonzales named to NAEP board

    Albuquerque Public schools board President Danielle Gonzales has been appointed to the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the Nation’s Report Card.

    Gonzales is one of two new members appointed Oct. 1 by U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. She has represented District 3 in Albuquerque’s North Valley since 2022.

    Gonzales is a senior fellow at One Generation Fund and has previously worked at New Mexico First, the Aspen Institute, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She previously was a fourth-grade teacher.

    “I am deeply honored to be selected to serve on the National Assessment Governing Board,” Gonzales said in a news release. “I look forward to contributing to the board, based on my background, experiences, and expertise, the ability to translate complex research into practical and relevant decisions. I have lived experience, as a bilingual person, Hispanic woman, parent, and product of the very public school system I now serve.”

    Expected to be released in early 2025, the 2024 Nation’s Report Card will provide critical information about how education systems are helping students make up lost ground since 2022 and meet the standards and expectations necessary to succeed in school and beyond.

    The nonpartisan 26-member Governing Board was established by Congress to set policy for the Nation’s Report Card. The board decides what grades and subjects to assess, content to include, and sets the NAEP achievement levels. It works with the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers NAEP, to release and disseminate results.

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  • Mariana Padilla named Public Education Secretary

    Mariana Padilla named Public Education Secretary

    Mariana Padilla, a long-time New Mexico educator and close confidant of Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, has been named the state’s new Public Education Secretary.

    Padilla has served as the Director of the New Mexico Children’s Cabinet since the start of the Lujan Grisham administration. Before that, she served as the congresswoman Lujan Grisham’s state director for six years.

    She replaces Arsenio Romero, who served as secretary for 18 months before resigning in August when he was named a finalist for the presidency of New Mexico State University.

    A native of Albuqueruque’s South Valley, Padilla began her career as an elementary school teacher in Albuquerque Public Schools. She later earned dual master’s degrees in community and regional planning and water resources from the University of New Mexico.

    “I am incredibly honored to be appointed by Gov. Lujan Grisham to lead the New Mexico Public Education Department,” Padilla said in a press release. “My career has been focused on serving the communities and families of our state. I am committed to working collaboratively with students, families, educators, and community partners to achieve the outcomes we all want to see. As a parent of grade school students, I share the sense of urgency to deliver for our kids.”  

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  • The misleadingly named Student Loans Company

    The misleadingly named Student Loans Company

    Why that title?

    Well, the name seems to mislead people into thinking that the provider of student finance is a private institution, potentially making profit out of students, when it is in fact publicly owned.

    There are 20 shares in the SLC: 17 are owned by the Department for Education (which has responsibility for English-domiciled students) and another three, each of those owned by one of the devolved administrations.

    When you want to see what’s going on with student loans you look at government accounts: national, departmental or those of devolved administrations.

    OK. So what’s the point of mentioning this factoid?

    I believe that the misunderstanding about the publicly-owned nature of the SLC contributes to thinking that leads to other confusions, such as those surrounding function of the interest rate in student loans and what the effect of reducing them would be.

    Here’s a former Higher Education minister getting into a pickle in an article that even has the title, “Student Finance? It’s the interest rate, stupid”.

    Let’s leave aside the misunderstandings about the recent ONS accounting changes and concentrate on the claim that reducing interest rates would “address the size of the debt owed itself”.

    The government is looking to reduce public debt, but lowering interest rates would only do this in the long-run, if the loan balances eventually written off were written off by making a payment to a private company to clear those balances.

    As it is, reducing interest rates on loans mean that higher earners will pay back less than they would otherwise and government debt would be higher in nominal terms (all else being equal). (I do support reducing interest rates on student loans, but for different reasons).

    There is probably another confusion here regarding the Janus-faced nature of student debt: it is an asset for government (it is owed to government) and a liability for borrowers. The outstanding balances on borrowers’ accounts are not the same as the associated government debt.

    When the government thinks about public debt in relation to student loans, it is thinking about the borrowing it had to take on in order to create the student loans.

    Imagine that I borrow £10 in the bond markets to lend you £10 for your studies: I have a debt to the markets and an asset, what you owe me. The interest on the former and the latter are not the same and the terms of repayment on the latter are income-contingent so I don’t expect to get sufficient repayments back from you to cover my debt to the markets.

    Student loans are not self-sustaining. It requires a public subsidy – any announcements about loans in the spending review at the end of the month will be about how much subsidy the government is prepared to offer.

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